SUNY COIL Conference 2018

Over these past years COIL has evolve to be an alternative for non-mobile students at Latin American Higher Institutions. It is through COIL that Latin American universities are experiencing a pathway to internationalize their students, their faculty and their curriculum. This session will consist in an overview of the progress and challenges that universities in Mexico, Brasil, Chile, and Colombia are facing when implementing COIL as an Internationalization at Home strategy. Lessons learned and the role of the Latin American COIL coordinators will be shared.

In 2017, the Observatory assessed the state of online and blended higher education around the world, from the United States to India, and Mexico to China. We examined twelve countries in all. Online learning has long promised transformative change for higher education in terms of student access, learning quality and cost, not least across international borders, but what is the reality today? This session considers the evidence.

Interest in the Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) model is growing both nationally and internationally. However, most structured COIL development workshops to date have been focused on courses and individual faculty members, while the broader questions of how COIL should be integrated into university infrastructure and how campus stakeholders should guide this endeavor have been much less discussed or scaffolded. Collaborative teaching between two classroom instructors in different locations is the foundation of a COIL course, but the sustainability, scale, and impact of the COIL model typically relies on a broader campus team and leadership commitment. Who are the key stakeholders, and what role does each play? Why is it important to involve senior leadership? What is the relationship of COIL to other internationalization activities and institutional partners? What professional development support is needed to sustain a COIL program? How can a new campus initiative ramp up activities and set goals for student engagement and course implementation? This 90-minute Action Lab will be a highly interactive session working through these and other questions primarily in small groups, with the goal that participants begin to develop a set of individual action steps or an implementation timeline to follow upon their return to campus. The lab will be limited to 24 persons.

This highly active session will provide attendees simple principles to help attendees each find ideal COIL partners and implement ideal assignments. Those present will each leave with a personalized plan for choosing among possible COIL partners as well as will have the opportunity at the end of the session to work out assignments tailored to their interests.

Finally attendees will be able to discover potential collaborations with professors from Quebec, given the roles Hoida and Flacks have played in facilitating courses and collaborations within the province and across international borders.

From the Program:
This two-part presentation and workshop, offered by Gabriel Flacks and David Hoida, two Quebec teachers and experienced COIL practitioners, will describe why and how international and cross-disciplinary collaborative partnerships are pedagogically impactful, using examples from across Quebec as a way to ground these considerations. It will help teachers and other institutional stakeholders such as IT reps and administrators discover how to choose ideal collaborative partners and envisage, concretely, how different collaborations could fit into their own institutions to provide students access to learning environments that are engaging and supportive of deep learning.
Over the last decade as a Humanities teacher at Champlain College, Saint-Lambert, Flacks has been involved in a variety of collaborative partnerships with his own classes (intercollegiate, interprovincial, and international) and has served as a support for many collaborative teaching partnerships across the CEGEP network in Quebec.
Current projects supported by David Hoida, teacher at McGill University and pedagogical counselor at Vanier College have developed language exchange opportunities in the context of culture exchange, involving debating indigenous rights, exploring current global events though multiple cultural and linguistic perspectives and developing international collaborative research projects. Hoida has recently taken over the organizational aspects of the The Virtual Team Teaching Network (VTTN) . This network based in Quebec, supports provincial wide, national and international online interactive team teaching initiatives that focus on students developing primary and secondary language competencies. Each of these VTTN initiatives exemplifies successful COIL relationships and will be explored in order to inspire future COIL participants and offer VTTN collaboration opportunities.

This talk reflects on seven years of experience developing, implementing, and institutionalizing an experimental collaborative, online international graduate course involving partner STEM research institutions in the Netherlands and United States. A unique feature of the course is that grad students have used distance/ virtual communication technology also in service as group externs for a third-party, international client organization. The talk reviews the initial aims, design and implementation of the jointly-developed course; identifies challenges and strategies for institutionalizing the course at the two universities; and explores prospects and challenges for further course and program development, as the institutions continue to expand and generalize traditional and collaborative distance learning, in both real-time and asynchronous modes.

New generations are becoming increasingly aware of being, not only citizens of their own communities, but also citizens of the world. They are aware of the interconnection between different countries at the social, political, economic and professional levels.
Therefore, high education Institutions face the challenge of providing their students with experiences that allow them to develop this kind of skills and knowledge, regardless of their professional area.
To extend the internationalization program, La Salle University joins the SUNY effort through the COIL Center to promote the creation of international collaborative courses with the support of technologies and to provide those students that cannot participate in an exchange program to acquire the intercultural skills and global competences in all its curricular programs.
In particular in La Salle México we have a COIL course that have been active for five consecutive periods. The course is “Seminario de Temas Contemporáneos de Comunciación”.
In order to COIL to succeed it must have a continuity within the course, the students would like to enroll to that course, because from quantitative results they have know the benefits, and also from voice to voice they have heard the benefits. If COIL happens only once in a course, it eventually will be forgotten.

COIL projects must be part of a larger curricular initiative at the level of the university classroom before internationalization goals can become programmatic. After five COIL projects, a Fulbright-Hays grant, and a Global Teacher Education Fellowship, the presenter will demonstrate the advancement of her work with preservice teachers. This presentation will provide a process by showing how one teacher educator worked to create a global curriculum in a required course. The presenter will offer a strategic and practical approach to internationalize a course that includes COIL as one of many areas of focus. The presenter will share how she incorporated activities that complement a COIL project, integrated a variety of new global texts, and revised previous assignments and assessments to meet the goal of internationalization by focusing on the development of global dispositions.

As ACE and Japanese Education Ministry (MEXT or Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology) have announced a new COIL initiative to expand Japan-USA higher education ties starting 2017, a great amount of interests in Japan is emerging to learn from those who have been pioneering the initiative. The workshop (the action lab) would like to take this opportunity to promote such an enthusiasm with the COIL practitioners in the US. The workshop also aims to provide a chance for the US (or other overseas) practitioners to understand further how it is like to develop a COIL course with Japan

We will present a review of our challenges as COIL partners to connect our science classes in sustainability projects with civic professionalism goals to an evolving partnership that unifies our specialities in chemical processes, plant science, where students reflect on their own community, forming groups about sustainability topics that concern them, researching the problem to propose sustainable solutions.

In this presentation we will introduce our new horizon as COIL partners presenting a research project aimed at design a production unit to dry regional products (vegetables, fruits and aromatic plants) using solar energy in a sustainable rural microenterprise model in a small community located in Coahuila, México.
Thanks to a COIL collaboration and partnership, students and teachers from Monroe Community College in USA and teachers and students from Instituto Tecnológico de la Laguna in México apply their knowledge and skills to serve the community in order to empower women through technology and entrepreneurship. This project granted by Partners of America and Televisa Foundation, promotes international partnership for innovation, collaboration and training opportunities for students and teachers in both countries.

As educators seek ways to embed high-impact applied learning concepts into their courses, COIL is a long-standing model that can manifest compelling projects if designed appropriately. Fundamentally, the COIL model aligns with the civic engagement definition of applied learning to educate global citizens.

Through participation in COIL projects, students develop team-based problem solving skills, intercultural competency as well as communication, digital literacy proficiency, through collaborating in teams with students from institutions around the world. Applied Learning is the framework, giving the collaboration a higher purpose, as well as providing a structure to keep students on task.

The presentation will review how the Applied Learning modality embedded into COIL curriculum makes course content compelling to students and accessible by doing. We’ll share the concepts of this pedagogical modality, review case studies, best practices, resources for success and brainstorm what Applied Learning COIL projects could work in your subject area.

The session will kick off with a explanation of the applied learning modality. Two presenters will spotlight case studies of their COIL collaborations that engage students in applied learning opportunities in the arts and sciences. The fourth presenter will then detail how the COIL professional development program incorporates applied learning criteria in the COIL course design. The interactive portion of the session will provide participants with the opportunity to co-create a COIL project that is infused with applied learning.